Faces of Loudoun: Clive Gilmore

Global Energy Innovator Flourishes in Loudoun County

Hanley Energy, a global innovator in Critical Power and Energy Management solutions, began operations in Ireland in 2009 before opening its United States headquarters in Loudoun County in 2015. The company’s core capabilities cover the design, development, supply and installation of critical energy management solutions from the grid to the data center. A location in Loudoun County’s data center hub helps the company ensure clients have access to 100% operational capacity and reduced energy costs.

“Hanley Energy originated from a startup business in 2009 focused on energy monitoring and management and the technology gaps around monitoring energy, gas, oil, water and anything considered either a prime mover or a resource used in business like liquid steam,” said Clive Gilmore, CEO/Co-founder, Hanley Energy. “My business partner, Dennis Nordon, and I started the business, and it’s sort of grown over the years to specialize in energy monitoring for data centers or critical facilities.”

Since opening its North American headquarters in 2015, the company has grown from two to over 790 employees. When Hanley Energy was considering an expansion to the United States, they explored the country from the West Coast to New York and New Jersey, searching for the perfect headquarters.

“We were trying to find a landing zone close to where our predominant projects were. Loudoun County is central to most of our projects in the United States. Its pro-business culture sold the deal,” said Mr. Gilmore. “Coming from Europe, they understood what a foreign direct investment company, I suppose, didn’t know. Loudoun Economic Development was a great help to us and offered a huge amount of resources valuable to establish operations here. They even helped us select legal and banking partners.”

The move into the United States market represented a significant investment in the future growth of Hanley Energy. A portion of the landscape in Loudoun County is known worldwide as ‘Data Center Alley’ and a location near data centers is vital for the company’s task of guiding customers through technology transformation to improve operational efficiencies. The location provides an ideal base of operations to serve the needs of Hanley Energy’s global customers.

“We are located in Data Center Alley where Virginia’s largest concentration of data centers are found. A vast percentage of the world’s data flows through Loudoun County. The county is supported not only by the data center businesses, but also by the federal government and similar agencies that require data center services or applications,” said Mr. Gilmore.

Hanley Energy invested $8 million in the company’s newest 40,000 sq. ft. facility, which is located next to One Loudoun, and provides office space for a large number of the company’s workforce. “We have roughly 200 people working here in the office, and about another 100-150 people across the country,” said Mr. Gilmore. “When we came here, we started in a room smaller than my office now. We were able to grow from building to building. Our latest facility is our home, certainly for the next five to ten years.”

The new facility has many innovative features that mirror those of Hanley Energy’s existing research and development headquarters in Ireland and serve to cultivate an optimal work environment for its employees. The facility recently won the 2023 NAIOP Northern Virginia Award of Excellence and 2024 Signatures of Loudoun Award for interior landscaping design, including a biophilic wall in the main lobby, exposed open ceilings and large skylights. By focusing on sustainability, Mr. Gilmore believes the design will benefit the mental health and wellness of the Hanley Energy employees. To support this, the company created an outdoor workspace where employees can go for a change of scenery or to recenter.

Hanley Energy also observes sustainability practices for the environment. Its data center clients are large investors in renewable energy. “Much of our technology is used to manage energy transition and decarbonizing within the data centers,” said Mr. Gilmore. “As some of the biggest investors in renewable energy, we process solar energy here in Loudoun County and hydropower out West. We’re in many countries around the world where renewable energy is an important trend. The vast majority of the gigawatts we have under control are from some renewable source.”

According to Mr. Gilmore, the Hanley Energy platform was designed when it wasn’t standard to connect to all kinds of different processes and applications within a building. That was left to more traditional, large Building Management Systems. The Hanley Energy systems are customized energy systems focused on utilization of energy, the efficiency of its use and the ability to switch it in and out as needed. “We participate in many Load Shedding programs in different parts of the world where we can essentially drop load when the grid reaches its maximum load threshold in a different region and switch over to the secondary generation on the sites. That’s where our products sit– in that space– enabling the transition and the management of the energy within the critical facilities to function more efficiently,” said Mr. Gilmore.

Hanley Energy’s sustainable platform is growing. The company plans to expand even further, and they just opened a new location in Dublin, Ohio. “The Ohio office is run centrally from here, so all the admin systems sit here. The new office gives us additional headcount in this region and supports our work out on the West Coast. We’ve been growing steadily every year, so we’re trying to maintain our focus on growing sustainably in the very technical realm that we live in,” Mr. Gilmore said.

Hanley Energy’s sustainably-sourced, energy-efficient power is made possible by its mission to identify and eliminate incremental waste. They hope that through this process, their software systems can more effectively analyze energy consumption, simplify the data points and enable consumers to prioritize clean energy sources in Loudoun County and globally.